Our intention is that the Darracott Challenge Prizes will be awarded to projects, programs, groups or people who are doing outstanding work in Mississippi in the areas targeted by the Foundation. The initial plan is for an annual prize that is to carry a substantial financial award and is to be presented in a prestigious, high profile award ceremony.

We are presently working with a number of informal local partners to screen candidates for the first award, which is to be given in a public ceremony with substantial media coverage in early 2001.

What should our Prize be trying to accomplish

There are basically five "pillars" of our prize philosophy here at the Darracott Foundation. In brief and in order, they touch on matters of social justice, local initiative, potential for self-replication, the way in which they handle time, and their potential for making good things better yet.

1. The first pillar of our award philosophy is a firm belief that the acid test must be the contribution of the selected project to social justice. It will be important to single out for public attention initiatives that have more than proportional positive impacts on the lives of those people for whom life is clearly harder in many respects: because their incomes are low, their days hard, their health not what it might be, their education below par, their social integration and economic opportunities not fully assured. Any project which does not make a fierce effort to ensure that these less favored elements of society are not major beneficiaries of the new arrangements is not, in our view, worthy of consideration for a prize of this sort.

2. Second, we consider it vital that any such accomplishment be above all based on local initiative, inputs and partnerships. If the project is simply parachuted on a basically passive place and driven by external experts, finance and... values, then we cannot give it our vote.

3. Third, the initiatives that deserve to be singled out for recognition should have goof potential for 'self-replication". By this we mean concepts or approaches which are so demonstrably superior to prevailing practices that they lend themselves to rapid replication elsewhere. This, in fact, is the real acid test of success.

   To make sure that we get our precise point across hers, we would like to contrast the kinds of approaches we have in mind for such recognition from some of the others that often get media attention and large gobs of public funding. The first are those projects or approaches which attain their success as a result of "throwing dollars at the problem". By this we mean those projects which owe their accomplishments above all to a considerable and continuing flow of public funding, and which therefore cannot be thought of as "naturally self-replicating". Again, in this regard, we need perhaps to point out that no matter how admirable may be the accomplishments of such privileged enclave projects, given their special financial character they probably offer little if anything to most of the people and places on this planet who simply do not have money to throw at their problems, at least not on that scale.

4. The fourth pillar has to do with a mature handling of the time vector. Getting anything of value accomplished in a complex, in many ways fundamentally inertial social and human environment (that being the nature of man), requires in the final analysis not so much a quick fix or once-off solution as a process, which may be long, laborious and problematical. The advantage of a process that is capable of spinning out over of time is that it gives us the possibility to learn and adapt, to learn from failure as well as success, and to "grow" organic solutions packages of many parts and with many people and groups behind them.

5. Finally, we would like to stress our firm belief that one of the goals of such a high profile reward should be, not only to draw the attention to the world of this great way of doing things -- but also to provide support for all those in the place or group that has won the award to stride ahead and do better yet. Success in these challenges is never easy, and the achievement is inevitably 'work in progress'. So if we can use these awards to encourage and support their recipients in their quest to do better yet, than we will have make a final, very important contribution.

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